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I use JetBrains products as my main IDEs, but then fire up VSCode for smaller editing tasks on things like Ansible Playbooks and Terraform scripts, as there are

I use JetBrains products as my main IDEs, but then fire up VSCode for smaller editing tasks on things like Ansible Playbooks and Terraform scripts, as there are official plugins for VSCode that are so much better than anything I've found on the Jetbrains marketplace. It's good to enter a directory, type 'code .' and do some quick editing without the Jetbrains process of creating a project around the directory. And I've grown to like the VSCode terminal, with side markers to help scrolling back to the start of a run and any errors. Having said that, there are all sorts of things I miss from Idea or Webstorm when using VSCode, like great integrated Git and local history support. You can kinda sorta get close with a collection of VSCode extensions, but it doesn't feel as cohesive or polished to me. And that diff viewer is very Visual Studio, whereas the Idea one seem much more polished to me, like Perforce. Maybe it's just what you're used to, and I've spent a lot of time in Idea and Webstorm. So for a large codebase, I'd definitely be inclined towards Jetbrains. As others have mentioned, the code discovery, navigation, and refactoring facilities are second to none. Not surprising as it's been continually developed as an IDE (rather than an editor) since 2001.

mdaniel 3y ago
> as there are official plugins for VSCode that are so much better than anything I've found on the Jetbrains marketplace It's a damn travesty what JetBrains has done to the CloudFormation plugin and by close-sourcing the terraform plugin then basically abandoning it. I'm aware there is a commercial ansible plugin but my experience with it is that it's not worth the money to me when, as you pointed out, the vscode language server for ansible does a fine job for the yaml, but sadly does nothing for the jinja2 snippets therein
ptx 3y ago
IntelliJ IDEA does have LightEdit mode to handle this use case: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/lightedit-mode.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/lightedit-mode.html
- timrichard 3y ago
  Thanks for the link... I checked out LightEdit, but it sounds like it leaves quite a lot behind : "..and it doesn't support the usual IDE editor features such as code completion, or code navigation." I remembered it's possible to use the Jetbrains Toolbox tool in order to generate shellscripts for command line startup. So 'ws .' when generated will do the same thing for WebStorm as 'code .'

mdaniel 3y ago

> as there are official plugins for VSCode that are so much better than anything I've found on the Jetbrains marketplace It's a damn travesty what JetBrains has done to the CloudFormation plugin and by close-sourcing the terraform plugin then basically abandoning it. I'm aware there is a commercial ansible plugin but my experience with it is that it's not worth the money to me when, as you pointed out, the vscode language server for ansible does a fine job for the yaml, but sadly does nothing for the jinja2 snippets therein

ptx 3y ago

IntelliJ IDEA does have LightEdit mode to handle this use case: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/lightedit-mode.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/lightedit-mode.html

timrichard 3y ago
Thanks for the link... I checked out LightEdit, but it sounds like it leaves quite a lot behind : "..and it doesn't support the usual IDE editor features such as code completion, or code navigation." I remembered it's possible to use the Jetbrains Toolbox tool in order to generate shellscripts for command line startup. So 'ws .' when generated will do the same thing for WebStorm as 'code .'